


Watch Me

by Cupcakemolotov



Series: come alive [46]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Bargains with Fae, F/M, Magic, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 00:47:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15449616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cupcakemolotov/pseuds/Cupcakemolotov
Summary: Caroline never thought she'd come to care for her charge.





	Watch Me

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: I love all your writing and am always looking forward to new material that you create! I was wondering how you would combine the Bodyguard and Fairytale trope for Klaroline?

The apartment was small. Humans called the space a studio, Caroline called it a box. Two days ago it had served its purpose well. She’d been barely able to stagger the meager distance from her bed to the bathroom, the iron poison still thick in her veins. But her fever had broken six hours ago and she could stand without trembling for short periods of time. Another 24 hours and she’d be strong enough to move to her secondary location.

If she made it that long.

Opening her eyes, she glowered at the space that had become too small, to tight. She’d never been claustrophobic, she’d never had survived her childhood if that had been the case. The fears she slowed herself were smaller, creepier. Too many legs and weird segmented bodies.

She pushed the memory of full lips compressing to hide a smile forcefully away the first time he’d seen her scamper away from a spider. Those memories shouldn’t matter anymore. Her bargain had been fulfilled and she was free now. A life for a life.

But Klaus was in the city.

It was the only explanation for the tightness of her skin, the ache in her bones. Ten years she’d stood in his shadow, her human with his witch blood and ruthlessness that put high fae to shame. She’d witnessed the bloodless dismantling of organizations and she watched as he’d stripped his enemies of things far more precious than money. He’d moved in the shadows as recklessly as a unseelie and with as much bloodlust.

She wondered when his mother had decided to destroy him. What kill had tipped the balance? What had he done that Esther Mikaelson, who bred often and with creatures far worse than witches, had looked at and feared? Who was Klaus’ father that he carried such promise in his blood?

Questions a decade she hadn’t found the answers to for all that she’d protected him. The bargain had never been with Klaus that she could satisfy her curiosity, for all that he had been the beneficiary. It had been her mother’s oath she’d paid. Klaus’ father had scored the contract in blood with Elizabeth and with her death that oath had become Caroline’s to fulfill. And when she’d been called, she’d come with the expectation that saving Klaus’ life would take less than a week. How wrong she’d been.

In the beginning, he’d had seen her as an insult, a supposed weakness visible to all who looked at her. Her magic was not subtle, for all that it was no great power. Her strength came in how she was perceived.

I could destroy you so easily. Pity the contract won’t allow it.

For ten years she’d watched him scheme and plot and devour. He destroyed as often as he’d conquered and he watched her with such dangerous eyes. And yet, somehow, with each barb tossed between them, with each snarled confrontation the human had grown just a little more cautious with his own life, had become far cleverer in his mecanations than a human should be. She’d have admired his tenacity if it hadn’t lengthened the duration of her forced servitude.

Klaus had gotten under her skin.

It annoyed and frustrated her in equal turns. He was pretty enough to tempt fae older and more dangerous than her with dimples and that rugged, slender strength only humans seemed to maintain. But it was his biteable lips she’d wanted to savage more than once as he smirked at her from behind his desk. That he was clever and dangerous only added to the appeal.

For ten years she’d skirted any real attachment. And it wasn’t until she’d take the poisoned dagger his mother had intended for his back that she’d fully grasped her own feelings. The contract has unraveled around her, sunshine and blood against her lips, and the wildness behind his eyes as he’d breathed her name, her true name, had torn something loose in her chest as she’d been teleported away.

She had worried about him.

Had he survived, after she fell?

Now she knew he had. Still, her name shouldn’t have been enough to track her. Sliding her eyes shut as she the sun shifted, Caroline absorbed the shaft of light hungrily. She was a creature of light and she’d burned through too much magic cleansing the iron and poison from her veins. She was tendons and flesh stretched painfully across bones with little of the magic she needed to hold herself together on an earth filled with religion and iron.

Klaus shouldn’t have been able to find her but his presence was as familiar to her senses as the burn of the sun. He was a hot ball of rage and worry, and his magic was as blood soaked as it had ever been. Chaotic and as mercurial as his moods, his power felt familiar and comforting against her senses. It burned like a promise.

She couldn’t feel his siblings, but whoever had survived the purge that must have occured would have been close as well. Klaus was more like the sidhe than he knew with his obsession with family and his lust for power. He’d never have left them behind so soon after an assassination attempt that had come so close to succeeding.

She shouldn’t have been able to any of them, Klaus included, at all. The contract had broken. There were no ties between them except for the lingering want she’d never have allowed herself to explore as long as the contract bound them. Caroline knew she could still run. All she had to do was set a single foot inside a door to Underhill and it would take her out of his reach. But as she lay their on the uncomfortable mattress against er spine and her magic a slow, careful thrum inside her skin, she didn’t want too.

There had been something in Klaus gaze as magic had torn her away that had lingered. Anger, frustration, worry and a promise of violence all wrapped up behind eyes she’d grown to know as well as her own. She would walk away from his possessiveness and his temper and his teeth clenched kindness, return to the life she’d walked away from to fulfill her mother’s promise. Return to the father who had created the weapon that had freed her mother’s ghost, however unintentionally.

Caroline knew what her future held if she left.

But here…

She knew he would search this city grid by grid, block by block until he found her. It would take hours and maybe even the time she needed to get back on her feet entirely. She could face him as the cool, uninterested fae she’d been for ten years. But the look in his eyes that haunted her. She wondered what he’d seen on her face before she disappeared. Slowly, carefully, her reserves stripped bare and nearly empty, she reached out for what she knew was Klaus and his magic. Tossed it the barest hint of her sunshine power. He grabbed it as tightly and as violently as she’d expected, the sudden push of his magic against her temporarily blinding.

Her magic winked out in a heartbeat, able to offer him nothing more. It didn’t matter. She may have only given him a direction, but she knew it was more than enough.

Klaus would find her.


End file.
